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Focus on Safety

Juanita L. Edge
Joan L. Kirby, East Dale Elementary School, Fairmont, West Virginia

Subject: Language Arts
Grade: 4-5

"The 'Focus on Safety' unit accomplished what we had hoped and much more. We believe that more challenging activities in the classroom would cause less discussion in the teachers' lounge of student apathy."

Purpose and Description of Project

Juanita Edge and Joan Kirby spotlighted the importance of children following a variety of safety rules as they go to and from school as well as during the school day. The primary product of the project was a slide/tape show dramatizing safety rules. It was planned and produced by fourth and fifth graders.

The students developed a list of the safety rules to be covered, set up interviews with school and community resource people, staged demonstrations of safety rules being followed or violated, and took slides to promote better safety habits. They also wrote and taped an accompanying narration and documented all their activities in prints for display on the school bulletin board.

Edge and Kirby believe that this project has impressed on their students the fact that safety rules and regulations really do have a practical application in real-life situations.

Activities

The teachers began by discussing the need for safety and asking students, with their parents' help, to compile individual lists of rules they felt were needed throughout the school day. A final group list of such rules was arranged sequentially from leaving home to returning there after school. Students then learned how to conduct interviews through role playing and small-group practice and again broke into groups to compile the questions that would be asked of each school or community resource person.

At this point, a photography instructor from a local college explained to the children how a camera works and how pictures are developed. He photographed the group for demonstration purposes. During the following week, the students both talked with resource people and set up photos showing good and poor safety habits.

Resource people included the school physical education instructor, who emphasized safety on playground equipment; the county sheriff and three members of his staff, who spoke about the dangers of talking to strangers and of drugs and allowed the children to sit in the patrol cars and try out the sirens; and a school bus driver, who conducted his session on the bus. The students also talked to cafeteria personnel about safety in food preparation and around machinery and took a tour of the kitchen and heard from the custodian about his responsibility for maintaining safe conditions in the school.

Other activities included keeping the school updated on the project through photo displays on the bulletin board. When all the slides had been taken and processed, students selected the best ones, wrote a script, and taped the narration.

Materials, Resources, and Expenses

In addition to the resource people already mentioned, the school music teacher wrote words and music for a safety song that the children learned and sang at the beginning and end of the taped narration. Equipment and materials included a 35 mm camera, film, a KODAK CAROUSEL Projector, a tape recorder, and cassette tapes.

Outcomes and Adaptability

The teachers report that the students took some excellent pictures and that tests showed significant gains in knowledge of what safety rules need to be followed throughout the school day. They also developed a better attitude toward school and learning, say Edge and Kirby.

Because of their belief that school safety is a concern in every school and at every grade level, the teachers think that a project like theirs would be useful to any teacher.

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